Jessica Costescu writes for the Washington Free Beacon about pending changes at the U.S. Department of Education.
Over the past four years, colleges and universities have violated the civil rights of Jewish students. Transgender ideology has proliferated, threatening women’s sports. And diversity, equity, and inclusion have increasingly trumped merit in the hiring and accreditation processes.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, will be tasked with addressing those problems and more. A litany of education experts spoke with the Washington Free Beacon to discuss how.
“The bottom line is that the next secretary of education will inherit a role that’ll feel a lot like cleaning up a bankrupt, dysfunctional Fortune 500 company,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Lawmakers and policy experts who spoke to the Free Beacon outlined the key challenges.The response of university administrators to anti-Semitic protests and encampments has left Jewish students vulnerable. Such protests exploded on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel. At many elite schools, however, student participants faced either no discipline or minimal discipline, according to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
It was mostly lawmakers on that committee, rather than the Department of Education, who held elite university leaders like Harvard University’s Claudine Gay to account. Outgoing education secretary Miguel Cardona “did little to nothing to counter the disgusting anti-Semitic behavior that was fueling across U.S. campuses,” said Parents Defending Education senior adviser Michelle Exner.
McMahon can reverse that posture. For one, she could take a more aggressive stance toward the department’s civil rights investigations into schools accused of discriminating against Jewish students. While the Biden-Harris administration has 92 active investigations, several have been open for years with no resolution. Those that were resolved resulted in insignificant changes like employee training and anti-discrimination statements.
